Hi, all
I am a Chinese in PRC, now preparing to use openfoam for a project about adaptive compliant wing. Please give me some advice on the linux version.
X64 is prefered, and abaqus 6.8, ansys 11, must be supported seamlessly. I have tried centos 5.2 and sles 10 sp2. CentOS is really not a good choice, some libs should be added in order to use abaqus and ansys. While sles is much better, I still can't compile paraview3.3cvs directly with the commands in OF readme. QT 4.3.2 and cmake 2.6 were added manually, Paraview was compiled finally through ccmake manuale configuration. But PV3FOAMREADER couldn't be compiled anyway I try manual configue or with Allwmake command.
Thanks a lot for anyone give me the help.

@Skyeagle: I use openSUSE and SLES 10 myself. I don't really think it is worth to change your distribution to fix a problem with one application, especially because you need other applications to be supported, and for example ANSYS includes SLES in their list of supported platforms.

I personally find ubuntu not really suitable if you want to use third party (mainly not open-source) products. Sometimes it is quite tricky to install them (see Intel compilers for example), and the stability/quality of the system compared to CentOS/RHEL/SLES is lower.

Paraview should compile fine installing QT 4.3 from SUSE Build Service. I searched for it, and the package is available also for SLE 10:

For cmake and gcc, I suggest to use the third party package provided by OpenCFD. It makes life easier ;-)

@ Renato: which version of SUSE/openSUSE?

Best,
Alberto

__________________
Alberto Passalacqua

GeekoCFD - A free distribution based on openSUSE 64 bit with CFD tools, including OpenFOAM. Available as in both physical and virtual formats.OpenQBMM - An open-source implementation of quadrature-based moment methods.

To obtain more accurate answers, please specify the version of OpenFOAM you are using.

It really depends on your use. SLES and openSUSE are very similar if you look at the interface and the functionalities.

The main difference is in support and in the version of the software provided.

openSUSE is a community distribution, released with a 6-8 months cycle, and with security updates for two years. It offers a wide range of software selection and of packages prepared by the community. Btw,the current version is 11.1, just released.

SLES is an enterprise quality distribution, supported up to seven years, with paid subscription to support/updates, with service packs and software upgrades for the main applications (browsers, office suite) and of course security updates. The current release is SLE 10, based on openSUSE 10.1, and the new release should come in the first part of 2009, based on openSUSE 11.1.

If you want recent applications, and you don't need enterprise support, you can go with openSUSE. If you want something more stable, clean, and supported for a long time (cluster/server?), you might want to go with SLE.

Let me know if you have other questions.

Alberto

__________________
Alberto Passalacqua

GeekoCFD - A free distribution based on openSUSE 64 bit with CFD tools, including OpenFOAM. Available as in both physical and virtual formats.OpenQBMM - An open-source implementation of quadrature-based moment methods.

To obtain more accurate answers, please specify the version of OpenFOAM you are using.

I would like to know the stability of operating system Ubuntu and REDHAT LInux for running OPENFOAM in common WorkStation. I felt the installation is quite straightforward in UBUNTU 8.10 when i run the script file( obtained from Discussion group) and its graphical support features are good. In regards with stability if anybody has any comments please let me hear from you. I am a new user to UBUNTU 8.10.

If I understand the concept of stability, it relates the infamous "blue sceeens" in windows ?

Typically one does not have such stability with Linux in general: no hangups or they are atleast curable hangups! I have been running OF-1.5 on OpenSuSE 10.3, SLED 10 and Ubuntu 8.10. I find all of them are stable and never had hangups on any of them.

So which linux variant to use is your personal choice (though OpenSuSE or Ubuntu are recommended).